Comic 1091 - Talk to the girls

Author Notes:

You go to talk to Faraday and Tesla about releasing, and trying to rehabilitate, Edison.

The walk there does a good job of reminding you how tired you really are--you feel physically sore, and short of breath even crossing the relatively brief distance.

Once in the Bunker E archive room, you bring up the prospect, and warn the girls that last time you saw Edison she was... well... pretty hostile. ...That's the nicest way you can think to phrase it.

Tesla winces, but Faraday seems to give it some thought. "I... feel we ought to try. She's our sister--I would so hate to think she can't be saved."

"Are... you doing alright?," Tesla asks quietly.

You're not at 100%, but you do feel better than you did earlier.

"It may be best to wait, then," Faraday concludes. "I'll do what I can to get through to Edison... but I can't be sure she'll listen. She was stubborn before all this happened, I... I don't know what she'd be like now. If she won't be talked to..." Faraday trails off, and glances aside.

Tesla fidgets, playing with her hands. "I... I want to help her, I do. I just... don't want anyone else to get hurt, either."

Comments:

since we're going to be in town tomorrow (or in a few days, for a few days? i guess?) ask the girls if there's anything they'd like. especially faraday, since we got a bunch of stuff for tesla already. also, ask if there's anything she wants to get out of her old room because we can let her in there if she likes. maybe not right now, but it's something we can definitely do

Ok better take there advice and have a spa day but can we do something real quick. Something been bothering me mainly the fact that the door to the base on the street in the city is undefended. The door we have to exit to transfer bases each time we swipe the keycard. It's a quick fix all we have to do is plant some eggs on the street out of sight so in a emergency we can draw from the red and create walls around door or golems. I really don't want to return from spa day and find the door under siege at least set up an blood alarm.

Our current blood alarm is roughly to inform us if Grizwald gets in trouble. The only way we are informed of anything passively from a thrall is if they die. We have to actively focus in order to get information from anyone through sensing.

Okay but CAN we set more than 1 blood alarm now? I mean, have we tried? I know when we first set it up we weren't, but we're a bit more used to The Red now then before so we might be able to set more. not something we have to try right now, but it'd be a good thing to contemplate in the future.

Also, let’s reassure them that we *will* make every possible effort to rehabilitate Edison. We just want to be careful and make sure we’re doing it right so that everyone involved can be safe and so we don’t end up betraying anybody’s trust.

I'll just repeat what I was saying last time: lets take a spa day, but fix this right after. Also see if martians want to check out their future home, see if they have any ideas about what they want to do with it and stop them getting 'bunker madness'.

Just want to again emphasize to wait until tomorrow before releasing Edison into a containment cell. The main idea is hopefully she'll at least stop killing; and barring that, we'll be gone for hours so at least she can sit in her room without us bothering her and think things over without us around.

It should also probably be pointed out as I doubt Gesenai & Co. informed Edison that 100 years has passed, all the scientists and basically everyone associated with them are dead, and the project that bunker was working on is effectively shutdown.
She's no longer a lab experiment or a tool or plaything. By that same token, she's now responsible for her own actions. So it'd be really nice if she could at least give playing nice a try; pretty please.

I'd actually prefer we were there. She needs to get used to us and stuff, I don't want the job of calming a violently disturbed child to be left to other children, even if she can't physically harm them (or can she?) and if she does manage to escape and we haven't made friends with her, then we'll potentially be walking into an ambush when we come back.

What if she doesn't want to talk or listen at first? What if she needs some time to think about and come to terms with the fact Faraday's back? We're right back to leaving Edison with her sisters ANYWAY. They have the best shot at calming her down, not us who she's fought with before. Waiting another day is a day wasted IMHO.

If for whatever reason Edison goes from murder-ghost mode to giddy-girl mode in 15 seconds after being let out great! Once we've made sure it's not a trick, we take her out of the containment cell, let her out into the bunker, and let her talk it out with us/her "sisters". Then we go on our merry way to Southden and everything is happy rainbows and hopefully we can bring Edison back a sewing gift when we're done with our day off.If that doesn't happen, we'll be in a position to remove ourselves for several hours so Edison won't be tempted to try to hurt/kill us because we're in the immediate area. Ilworth is a literal ghost town and the only other place with living people takes hours to walk to by foot and that's assuming Edison, who has the mindset of a child, doesn't get lost/distracted along the way. Also if she does breakout and prepares an ambush, we can just ask Faraday to inform us. We can even setup Mini-Mine as a guard/informant to warn us.

After today, we'll likely we working with Bunker E to get Ilworth's power restored. This also might mean Ilworth will become populated with the refugees. We'll lose Edison having zero targets to rage against for several hours so she can cool down unless we delay everything else we want to work on. That's why I'd like to take advantage of this unique situation where we are purposefully "wasting" a day anyway AND have a setup where Edison can be properly "alone" with absolutely nothing she can murder (aside from random feral animals) so that, on the off chance she's inconsolable right after being let out, she has the proper environment to cool off in.

I think maybe there's a miscommunication going on, so I'll just make my vote that we go and take a day to rest up first, so we're prepared for whatever happens when we let her out, and book the rest of the day to handle it.

As a bonus, ghost-Mine has no blood which evidently is part of the fun for Edison.

Worst-case scenario: Edison immediately breaks out of containment and attacks. Mine goes into ghost mode (again why I want to wait until tomorrow to do all this) and restrains her. Caius/Michelle re-canisters her and we go about our day knowing we tried and will have to come back to Edison much, much later (if ever at that point).

Another comforting thought about freeing Edison is that error!Fuse didn't say anything about it.
Error!Mine went through incident F earlier than we did, so she probably had time to rest then free Edison without problems before the whole church fiasco.

Hell, reuniting the girls might be exactly what Fuse meant by "worth it".

Mini-Jane will obey simple commands right? If we command Mini-Jane to obey Tesla and Faraday, we can leave mini-Jane with the ghost girls right now to give them a semi-functional playmate and increase our cuteness reservoir!